First class

Every picture tells a story-even one on a postage stamp. Presented hugely enlarged, the 144 stamps in this book chronicle a stylish era of design: mid-20th-century America. Spanning the late 1950s to the early 1970s, these mini-masterpieces were created when the US post office started to lavish color on its stamps and to hire the best midcentury talents to design them. The roster includes Japanese American children's book illustrator Gyo Fujikawa, barrier-busting Black graphic artist Georg Olden, industrial design legend Raymond Loewy, and sultan of psychedelia Peter Max. Photographed at five, ten, and even fifteen times actual size, each stamp is presented with a morsel of fun info that will broadly appeal to stamp collectors, history and nostalgia buffs, midcentury design fans, and everyone who likes to geek out on magnified views of tiny, beautiful images.